Modern networking environments provide enormously enhanced data transmission capabilities over environments available only a few years ago. However, the demand for bandwidth is constantly increasing, as is the demand for more routing and monitoring capabilities. In order to meet this demand, network devices such as routers need to increase the number of ports serviced and the features they provide.
For example, network devices need to implement Quality of Service (QOS) features, which can provide better and more predictable network service by ensuring a dedicated bandwidth to be available, improving loss characteristics, avoiding and managing network congestion, shaping network traffic, and setting traffic priorities across the network. Currently, many QOS features are implemented using software. However, software implementation is impractical for the large bandwidth routers needed to handle the increasing amount of network traffic. Similarly, network devices need to be able to route broadcast or multicast packets and jumbo packets, and to provide network monitoring capability.
Therefore, there is a need for a large bandwidth network device that can efficiently route packets with, for example, “the Internet protocol” (IPv4) type of service (TOS) fields for QOS services. Additionally, the network device should efficiently route jumbo packets and broadcast or multicast packets (including multicast packets with different VLAN IDs). Finally, the network device should be configured to perform network monitoring without the use of additional probes.